There was, way back in the mists of... 2007... a recurrent meme among several comics art blogs. Reclaiming characters from their owners, I guess it could be broadly described as... people were reimagining abused characters (chiefly Supergirl) as artistic call-and-response various places, chiefly LiveJournal. In the aftermath of that, I did a similar thing on old messageboard The Engine, called REMAKE/REMODEL. They were embraced as technical exercises, bits of fun, ways to get the brain moving. I think most people's favourite was the dear late Mike Wieringo's wondrous retro-aristo Buck Rogers...

I thought it might be an interesting thing to bring back here. So, once a week, I'll call a character, and you art types here can post images of your reinterpretation of that character. Photography and digital art is also fine, before anyone asks.

The point is REinterpretation: remake/remodel.

---

Jess Nevins, take it away:

The Gadget Man. Click Rush, the Gadget Man, was created by Lester Dent and appeared in Crime Busters from 1937 to 1938. Rush was a tall, lean, strong young man with brown hair and eyes. (Brown was his favorite color; he usually dressed all in brown.) Rush was an amateur investigator who invented gadgets towards this end. He'd come to the "big city" with the "notion of selling super-modern, crook-catching gadgets to the police." After the cops laughed him out of the station house he went out on his own.

Well, okay. He was prompted by a talking toad: "Bufa, of the species Bufonidae, which feeds on snails, slugs, insects, and such undesirable things....(I'm) eager to hire an expert private detective to investigate crimes I think need solving." The toad succeeds in convincing Click to solve crime (the $10,000 fee for each crime helped, too.) but proved to be an only average boss, enjoying giving Click the razz and showing a mean sense of humour.

Among Rush's gadgets include a portable x-ray device, phone-tapping equipment, a bulletproof vest, a repeating hypodermic needle he used to deliver a knockout drug; exploding matches; knockout gas vials; containers of liquefied tear gas; and a number of other such things.

A mad inventor and techno-detective of the 1930s who believed himself to be the employee of a toad. I suspect the toad to be the kind depraved people lick.

Anyway. Wrap your brains around that one.

--

Your task, as ever, is to re-invent that into something a 21st Century audience could enjoy.

I look forward to seeing what you come up with, but bear in mind this is an ART thread. No pen-portraits. This is ART ONLY. Posting just a bunch of text, or a scribble and a vast number of words, will get the thread closed and your account banned.

edit: oh good god, i just did a search for jack staff, and it's practically the cover to one of the trades (ironically the only one i don't have as a trade, not that's much of an excuse). i was going for a grist kind of feel to it, that's what the brief said to me. i honestly didn't see this when i drew it! sorry if this annoys anyone, i'll take it down and re-do if you want.

to be fair, it is poses like that paul uses a lot, and like i said, i was already chock-full of love for the guy's work and wanted to carry that feeling over for this one.